14 DAY TRIAL // European laser scientists will benefit from funds amounting to ?500m which will used to build a laser fusion facility.
The team, consisting of scientists from seven European Union countries, thinks that a "fast ignition" laser facility would significantly contribute to fusion research, as well as to other areas of physics.
The laser would be used to compress and heat a small capsule of deuterium and tritium until the nuclei are hot enough to undergo nuclear fusion and produce helium and neutrons. In a reactor the energy of the neutrons would be used to generate electricity without the emission of greenhouse gases or the generation of long-lived nuclear waste.
"The energy problem is sufficiently urgent that we cannot afford to ignore different approaches to fusion," he says. Hutchinson also stresses that any fast-ignition laser would be a civilian facility, and would be available for research on astrophysics, atomic physics and nuclear physics as well.
Fast ignition was first demonstrated at the Gekko XII laser at Osaka University in Japan in 2001, working with a team of UK scientists.
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